| Shared by Clarice Feldman on Facebook: |
On April 13, 1992 — 33 years ago last month — an old man died alone, suffering from pneumonia, in an undisclosed location in northern China, a prison with no name and no warden, a place which did not officially exist. The man was Peter Joseph Fan. When he died, his family and friends had not heard from him in years. Most assumed he was dead already, and those who believed he was still alive probably prayed that his death would come quickly.
Soon after his death he was dumped without fanfare at his family home, wrapped in plastic and a cheap body bag, with a note saying he had died of pneumonia. Many of his bones were broken. Some had been broken, knitted back together without treatment, and broken again. He had been tortured and abused. He was malnourished.
He was a bishop, a successor of the apostles, and a priest of Jesus Christ.
Peter Fan was ordained a priest in 1934, in Rome, after studies at the Urbaniana. He went home to China soon after. In 1951, when he was 43, Pope Pius XII named him Bishop of Baoding.
Soon after, it became impossible for the Vatican to appoint bishops in China. Persecution of Christians expanded amid the nation’s Cultural Revolution, and Beijing claimed for itself the right to appoint bishops to Chinese dioceses.
Meanwhile, Fan, respected among his brother bishops and with a supposedly big personality, became a target of the Communist authorities. In 1957, when the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association was founded by the Beijing government, Fan resisted.
He would not swear an oath granting supremacy of the government over the pope. He would not concede civic authority over liturgy and catechesis.
Bishop Fan was arrested. He spent the next 21 years in a forced labor camp, by most accounts. While he was incarcerated, the government announced he was no longer Bishop of Baoding, but did not fill the post with anyone else.
He was released in 1979. And he stayed out of jail for a little while, getting down to the business of leading his diocese.
But then in the early ‘80s, under a special indult permitting episcopal ordination in the Chinese underground Church, Bishop Fan consecrated three bishops — without government approval — and he ordained priests, who had not registered with the patriotic association.
For that, he was arrested in 1982, sentenced to a decade’s hard labor, and put in prison. He was in his 70s by then. Most of his episcopate had been spent in labor camps.
In 1988, he was released amid international protest, kept under house arrest, and ferreted from place to place. Few bishops or priests could meet with him without risking arrest themselves.
But his very presence — that he was even alive — was an encouragement to the underground Church. From house to house, and person to person, he was quietly prayed for as a hero, a confessor of the faith, as in the days of the early Church.
In November 1989, the bishops of the Chinese underground Church met clandestinely in Shaanxi. They formed a secret episcopal conference, in defiance of the state-mandated one. They unanimously named Bishop Fan their honorary president.
And then those bishops began to be arrested, or disappeared. Nine bishops in the next few months were taken into custody, along with three dozen priests. Some were released, others kept indefinitely.
And in 1990, Bishop Fan was disappeared. There was no official record of his jailing, there were no charges filed. No one who loved him knew where he was, until his body was dumped outside his family home. No one knew what torture he faced.
But if he had recanted — rebuked the name of Jesus or the nature of the Church — the authorities would have announced it, as a major propaganda victory. That victory never came.
Instead, Bishop Fan seemingly had a different victory. A silent victory. The victory of the resurrection itself.
He was 84 when he died. He had spent more than 34 years incarcerated. He has not been declared a martyr, but that’s what he was. Thirty thousand people came to his funeral, despite government warnings to stay away. His grave was honored as a shrine by Chinese Catholics, until the government razed it.
Then the spot where his grave had stood was honored just the same.
Owing to the politics of the moment, he will not likely be canonized soon.
But I suspect he is now in the fullness of the beatific vision. He died for faith in the gift of the Church — he died for obedience to the Roman Pontiff, and for his faith in the Petrine Office itself.
This week, I suspect he is praying for Pope Leo XIV. We ought to do the same.
- The Pillar 
|
